Salt Lake Tribune Review

Time to meet Lisbeth Salander, possibly the first essential literary character of the 21st century.

Lisbeth is an angry and withdrawn Goth woman — with black hair and clothing, and piercings all over — who has a lot to be angry about, including a history of legal problems and abuse. She’s also a first-rate computer hacker and one woman you don’t want taking a dislike to you.
Lisbeth, created by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson and brought to passionate life by actress Noomi Rapace, is the title character of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” a rousingly intelligent mystery from Danish director Niels Arden Oplev.

When we first meet Lisbeth, she’s on the job, collecting data for her security firm on Mikael Blomkvist (solidly played by Michael Nyqvist), a disgraced magazine journalist who has just been given a three-month prison term for libeling a powerful industrialist — though Blomkvist maintains he was set up to take a fall.

While Lisbeth is dealing with her own problems — namely, a new parole officer (Peter Andersson) who abuses her and blackmails her for sexual favors — her client offers Mikael a job to occupy the six months before his prison sentence starts. The client is Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), an aging tycoon who wants Mikael to investigate the disappearance 40 years ago of his beloved niece, Harriet. When she disappeared, Henrik tells Mikael, the island where the Vangers live was cut off from the mainland, so whoever caused her disappearance was probably in the sprawling and thoroughly nasty Vanger family.

Mikael pores over police files, old photographs, and Harriet’s diary and bible, but doesn’t come up with much. That is, until he types a list of numbers Harriet left into his computer — and Lisbeth, who’s still linked into Mikael’s laptop, decodes the numbers. Thus is a strangely offbeat but surprisingly effective detecting duo born.

Oplev and his screenwriters, Nikolaj Arcel and Rasmus Heisterberg, move fluidly through the clues and twists of Larsson’s story (one of a trilogy Oplev has adapted from the novels Larsson left behind with his death in 2004). Along the way, we encounter sadists, Nazis, double-dealing relatives, some starkly brutal violence and surprising sexuality — a lot to jam into one movie, even at two-and-a-half hours, but Oplev handles it adroitly. (He makes the inevitable American remake, which is tentatively slated for 2012, a tough act to follow.)

The driving force of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is Rapace, who gives Lisbeth the insolence and underlying tenderness of this abrasive and sometimes downright unlikable character authentic and even, in her odd way, charming. Her performance gives Lisbeth the heat of a dragon’s breath, and makes the movie one cool experience.
-- Sean P. Means

great film

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